Shrink Wrapping of Banana for Enhancing Shelf Life

Understanding the importance of packaging techniques for reducing the post harvest losses in highly perishable fruits like bananas; has always been a major concern for food process engineers and scientist. The increased production of bananas is supplemented with the effect to minimize post harvest losses by adopting suitable techniques. The most important approach is use of shrink wrapping in increasing the shelf life of banana. Shrink wrapping using an engineered plastic film produces a micro atmosphere, retard ripening by limiting the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, reduces shrinkage of produce; protect the produce from diseases and mechanical damages etc. So, why should we use Shrink wrapping? The basic answer is because it is most easily handled technique in increasing the shelf life of whole banana. This book dealt in detail the application of shrink wrapping in increasing the shelf life of bananas. Authors feel the book will be useful to research scholars, academicians, food technologists and food process engineers.